Rocking vibration of a rigid circular disc in a transversely isotropic full‐space

In this paper, forced rocking vibration of a rigid circular disc placed in a transversely isotropic full‐space, where the axis of material symmetry of the full‐space is normal to the surface of the plate, is analytically investigated. Because of using the Fourier series and Hankel integral transforms, the mixed boundary‐value problem is transformed into two separate pairs of integral equations called dual integral equations. The dual integral equations involved in this paper are reduced to Fredholm integral equations of the second kind. With the aid of contour integration, the governing integral equation is numerically evaluated in the general dynamic case. The reduced static case of the dual integral equations is solved analytically and the vertical displacement, the contact pressure and the static impedance/compliance function are explicitly determined, and it is shown that the pressure in between the plate and the full‐space and the compliance function reduced for isotropic half‐space are identical to the previously published solutions. The dynamic contact pressure in between the disc and the space and also the related impedance function are numerically evaluated in general dynamic case and illustrated. It is shown that the singularity exists in the contact pressure at the edge of the disc is the same as the static case. To show the effect of material anisotropy, the numerical evaluations are given for some different transversely isotropic materials and compared. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Post-2012 CDM multi-criteria analysis of industries in six Asian countries: Iranian case study

The prospects of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and for carbon income, up to and beyond 2012, in the industrial sectors of Iran and five other Asian countries are investigated. The attractiveness and suitability of each host country, the status of their industrial sectors (based on four post-2012 scenarios), and the post-2012 potential of the CDM (or similar carbon projects) in these sectors are all examined. A multi-criteria analysis of Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, China, and India, based on seven sets of criteria (institutional, regulatory, economic, political, social, CDM experience, and energy production/consumption), is conducted, and the post-2012 potential carbon incomes of each country – based on CO₂e emissions of industrial processes – are calculated. Finally, the Iranian industrial sector and the impact of deregulation of energy prices are examined. The post-2012 potential savings in the Iranian industrial sector are calculated based on energy savings, carbon income, and environmental savings. The results indicate that there is strong demand for investment and new technology in this sector to combat several-fold energy price increases. Moreover, high-priced carbon credits could play a meaningful role in post-2012 energy policies in this sector.

Policy relevance

This research is the first study to quantify the carbon market potentials in the industrial sectors of the selected Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) members. The Kyoto Protocol is considered by most OPEC countries to be a mixed bag of threats and opportunities and they have shown ambivalence towards it, mainly due to the threat a reduction of fossil fuel consumption poses to their economies. On the other hand, energy efficiency is a desirable goal for their industrial sectors. Iran, as an OPEC member country with vast energy resources, has mostly ignored the CDM during the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol and has performed poorly on CDM implementation. However, the current deregulation of energy prices in Iran, with profound cuts in energy subsidies, would definitely alter the perspective of its industrial decision makers on the post-2012 carbon potentials.     

Investigating the capability of deformation rate analysis method in stress estimation: a case study of water conveyance tunnel of Gotvand Dam

Knowledge of the magnitude and orientation of the initial in situ stress of rock mass in underground spaces in mining, construction, and oil projects are so vital; hence, putting it aside could not only cost a lot rather incur some irrecoverable damage. Various methods are available to estimate in situ stress in rock mass. However, the most commonly used one, i.e., hydraulic fracturing (HF) method is considered expensive and time consuming. As a matter of fact, laboratory methods based on drilled “core” have become prevalent these days considering them simple, cheap, and quick. Taking into account one such procedure, i.e., deformation rate analysis (DRA), the current research tries to review the DRA capability in determining the magnitude of initial in situ stress is in different parts of stress–strain curve. Further, an investigation was made about the usage of DRA method for both brittle and ductile rocks. To compare the DRA and hydraulic fracturing methods in in situ stress measurement, the water conveyance tunnel of Gotvand Dam was selected as a case study. The DRA tests were conducted on core samples prepared from blocks of tuff (as brittle) and soft sandstones (as ductile) from shallow quarry. The results show that the DRA method is suitable for all types of intact rock and that this could easily estimate in situ stress values. A comparison between in situ stress values obtained by DRA and those of HF method show the feasibility of geotechnical project, simplicity, speed, and low cost.     

Non-Poisson probabilistic seismic hazard assessment

The development of the new seismic hazard map of metropolitan Tehran is based on probabilistic seismic hazard computation using the non-Poisson recurrence time model. For this model, two maps have been prepared to indicate the earthquake hazard of the region in the form of iso-acceleration contour lines. They display the non-Poisson probabilistic estimates of peak ground accelerations over bedrock for 10 and 63 % probability of exceedance in 50 years. To carry out the non-Poisson seismic hazard analysis, appropriate distributions of interoccurrence times of earthquakes were used for the seismotectonic provinces which the study region is located and then the renewal process was applied. In order to calculate the seismic hazard for different return periods in the probabilistic procedure, the study area encompassed by the 49.5–54.5°E longitudes and 34–37°N latitudes was divided into 0.1° intervals generating 1,350 grid points. PGA values for this region are estimated to be 0.30–0.32 and 0.16–0.17 g for 10 and 63 % probability of exceedance, respectively, in 50 years for bedrock condition.     

Unified bounding surface model for monotonic and cyclic behaviour of clay and sand

Acta Geotechnica - This paper presents a constitutive model enabled to simulate monotonic and cyclic behaviour of clay and sand in a unified framework. The bounding surface concept has been...     

Comparison of spatial interpolation methods for gridded bias removal in surface temperature forecasts

All numerical weather prediction (NWP) models inherently have substantial biases, especially in the forecast of near-surface weather variables. Statistical methods can be used to remove the systematic error based on historical bias data at observation stations. However, many end users of weather forecasts need bias corrected forecasts at locations that scarcely have any historical bias data. To circumvent this limitation, the bias of surface temperature forecasts on a regular grid covering Iran is removed, by using the information available at observation stations in the vicinity of any given grid point. To this end, the running mean error method is first used to correct the forecasts at observation stations, then four interpolation methods including inverse distance squared weighting with constant lapse rate (IDSW-CLR), Kriging with constant lapse rate (Kriging-CLR), gradient inverse distance squared with linear lapse rate (GIDS-LR), and gradient inverse distance squared with lapse rate determined by classification and regression tree (GIDS-CART), are employed to interpolate the bias corrected forecasts at neighboring observation stations to any given location. The results show that all four interpolation methods used do reduce the model error significantly, but Kriging-CLR has better performance than the other methods. For Kriging-CLR, root mean square error (RMSE) and mean absolute error (MAE) were decreased by 26% and 29%, respectively, as compared to the raw forecasts. It is found also, that after applying any of the proposed methods, unlike the raw forecasts, the bias corrected forecasts do not show spatial or temporal dependency.     

GeoCorpora: building a corpus to test and train microblog geoparsers

In this article, we present the GeoCorpora corpus building framework and software tools as well as a geo-annotated Twitter corpus built with these tools to foster research and development in the areas of microblog/Twitter geoparsing and geographic information retrieval. The developed framework employs crowdsourcing and geovisual analytics to support the construction of large corpora of text in which the mentioned location entities are identified and geolocated to toponyms in existing geographical gazetteers. We describe how the approach has been applied to build a corpus of geo-annotated tweets that will be made freely available to the research community alongside this article to support the evaluation, comparison and training of geoparsers. Additionally, we report lessons learned related to corpus construction for geoparsing as well as insights about the notions of place and natural spatial language that we derive from application of the framework to building this corpus.